Choice or Feeling?

Does non-stop moving take you away from sad thoughts or yourself? Does chasing goals fill your life with meaning or simply helps days end faster? Is anything real because it’s meant to be or do you make up your own reality? The answer is always BOTH. There isn’t one thing in life that is absolute, it’s a unity of the opposite poles – hence, never-ending fight of what should be mutually-exclusive ideas; ever-present paradox. You just need to lean towards one pole more than the other, yet keeping both in mind as possible. It’s like choosing to be good yet acknowledging that there will always be room for mistakes.

Can your true personality be tested by an impulse? When a neighbor’s girl came to our house bleeding because she cut herself badly on the glass, my husband mumbled “why don’t you call 911” and I screamed “let’s go, we are taking you to the hospital”. Does that make him bad (well, he was extremely tired) and me good because I didn’t question my decision for a second? We spent three hours in the emergency room and my sister, upon hearing the story, said that maybe one day someone will help me too because I need it, this will compensate for all the inconvenience we went through. But that’s not how I was thinking! I wasn’t earning points maybe for once in my life. It did feel absolute. There are many decisions I make out of duty whereas emotionally I’m out of it: I force myself to be good and to care whereas my true self doesn’t give a damn. And it upsets me because I am a supporter of goodness. So it makes me feel relieved to care for real, as if I surprise myself with my own capabilities, with the grandness of my heart I didn’t know was there.

And what does really count? Being good because that’s the way to be or being genuinely good because your heart is in it? Or be honestly indifferent? Or cultivate goodness in the place of indifference and thus slowly push it out? Will the law of the transformation of quantity into quality apply here?

Happy, Passive, Lazy

I want to challenge myself but I’ve had too much long-sought comfort lately to rush and disrupt it. I cherish this comfort, I cherish sleeping through the night because no anxiety chases the sleep away. But I also feel like I’m getting too inert, too sleepy, too lazy…. This recent inactivity after a chain of my previous battles has slowly been turning from a getaway to a burden. You want to avoid any kind of extremes in life, even the positive ones, since they soften you up, turn your brain into a mushy jelly, opiate the acuteness of feeling.

I made it easier for myself to give up, to accept that “it is what it is”, to postpone making decisions till some indefinite future moment when “the opportunity presents itself”. I feel being dragged by days that come and go, only occasionally rebelling and briefly taking control back. But once I get really angry because my passiveness resulted in the undesirable deviation in the course of things, my determination and will resurface with long-forgotten strength. Then I begin fixing what went wrong, amazed by a number of options I failed to see or consider before.

This mind slumber is dangerous. Even once you snap yourself out of trance and successfully implement all your life-changing reforms, it’s painful to look back, to feel regret for time lost. Apparently staying alert takes effort: even if it means challenging yourself on a daily basis to achieve simple tasks that are not crucial for your well-being yet essential for self-discipline. Staying open-minded and flexible will help you notice sooner the dead-end ahead and promptly change direction.